TL;DR - It's super fun and good. Perfect on deck if you're a steam deck user.

I have no history with either mystery dungeon or resident evil games ironically, but I saw this game and gave it a shot. I think it's excellent. I barely have time into it, but what I've played is fun, interesting, engaging, and challenging.

The aesthetic is on point, paying deliberate homage to RE1. I dig the retro graphical style. The environments are heavily brown and grey, with color accents that keep it from looking dull. Very fetid blood feeling.

Controls are simple and well executed, even the tank controls outside of the main game. Again, I have no experience with RE games, especially old school RE, so I had to laugh out loud when it took me half a minute to get over to the item chest. I respect the decision. (I do wish you could remap the menu button though, but that's a nitpick.)

What I've experienced of the gameplay loop so far, is fantastic. Again, no experience with mystery dungeon games so this is probably expected for fans of the genre, but every movement has a significant element of decision making, in a chess-like way. But it's not stressful or overwhelming. It's easy to get the hang of the basics, and then you start figuring out how to exploit enemy movements, what items do what, how to maximize distance, timing, turn-taking, ammunition, and the run itself. Despite kind of sucking and getting clapped by the first boss, I can see paths forward or opportunities to improve my strategy and prevail. The failures have all been on me, which is so satisfying.

The rogue-lite (or whatever don't @ me you know what I mean) elements are well done and suit the game. (Very minor gameplay spoilers for the rest of this paragraph:) Runs aren't as punishing thanks to items that let you abandon the run, but keep your items - letting you regroup, keep your good equipment, sell off what you don't need, save up to buy better items in the future, and jump back in for another try. This is mildly exploitable, but it's not like you can just do 10 runs, save up 1000 coins, buy a lightning zweihander and steamroll the game. Ammo and inventory space will still be limited, items you need during runs will still be sparse, bosses will still hit like trucks. You will need strategy, resourcefulness, and luck to make it far. The "one more run" feeling is strong.

It doesn't matter if you're not a fan of horror, Resident Evil, or mystery dungeon games. It's just good. If you are a fan of games, give it a try.

I liked it more than I thought. I'm not really an RE fan, but I love traditional roguelikes and mystery dungeon games. The early era PS1 aesthetic is great.

That all being said, this is kind of basic and a lot of the time it just feels like combat is a war of attrition. There are a bunch of Blair Witch stick effigies around that will do different things, (push, confuse, weak, etc) but there are only a few types and all their icons look the same. There are serums (potions) that are unidentified when you pick them up, same with higher grade armor and weapons. Thing is, I've not found a whole lot of different serum types either. You also have the RE herbs.

Equipment you find is varied. While nothing to write home about, there are more different kinds of items and buffs on those items than probably the effigies and serums put together. Weapons and armor also level up the more you use them. I don't think anything goes beyond maybe level five though. If it does, I've yet to find something.

You also can find spells, which persist across runs once you read the book. You can also use a crystal to pull you back the the room with the shopkeeper/stash box. That way you can store stuff you find for later runs or sell it. The shopkeeper also has the options to buy and identify items. Be aware though, when you warp back, for all intents and purposes the run starts over again. You'll still have all your items, but you'll be back at level one and on the first floor of whatever section of the mansion you were on.

There is an option to rebind keys, which is great. I like to map everything to the numpad when I play these sorts of games. BUT... the one button you can't remap is ESC, and it's the button you use to open the menu to cast spells. I wish there was either a dedicated spells button that you could map, or have the ability to rebind ESC. Or else, just a completely different, remappable button for the menu. So, at least I can play 90% the way I prefer.

I got it on the 2026 Spring Sale for like $8, and I think that's fair. If I bought it at full price, I'd probably have regretted it though. Especially since a great traditional roguelike horror game, Infra Arcana, is free and much deeper than this. Granted, it only has tileset (or ASCII) graphics as opposed to the 3D graphics this game boasts.

In the end, it's got it's issues, and is a bit on the basic side compared to a majority of the genre that I've played, but it is fun enough and I would overall recommend it. I'd love to see this game get updates to add more content/deeper systems. THAT would make it worth full price, no question.

super cool game!

not sure what i was expecting but it wasn't nearly as fun as what i experienced here.

its like a resident evil themed classic roguelike dungeon crawler.

very fun, lots of variety, classic roguelike mechanics (throwing items, inspecting equipment, memorizing spells, mystery potions, traps, and fun single-use hexes among other things), charming aesthetics and sounds, my new favorite steamdeck game!

would absolutely recommend.